Forging Zero

by Sara King

  Closing his eyes, he pushed his rifle deeper into the tunnel and pulled himself forward again. He did it again and again, his eyes squeezed shut, forcing himself to just keep inching along. Ten minutes later, he stumbled out of the black honeycombed tower and fell to his hands and knees, gasping. The ferlii-tainted air had never smelled so good to him, and he couldn’t get enough of it, sucking in deeper and deeper lungfuls into his chest. Panting, he lowered his forehead to the ground and tried to force himself to stop hyperventilating.

  One by one, the members of his platoon piled out of the honeycomb behind him. Distantly, he knew they were giving him odd looks, but he couldn’t bring himself to get up, so relieved was he to be in open air again.

  “Joe?” Maggie said, coming up to him. She squatted and touched his shoulder where it touched the ground. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Joe lied into the dirt. His whole body, however, betrayed him. He was shaking all over, his limbs weak and lifeless. He knew his actions baffled the other kids, but he didn’t care. He was so glad to be out of the tunnel that nothing mattered to him anymore. A Dhasha prince could have walked up to him in that moment and Joe wouldn’t have noticed.

  After taking a long moment to steady himself, Joe reluctantly sat up to survey their surroundings. All of his platoon had made it safely out of the tunnel and were clustered around him expectantly. They were on the far side of the clearing, almost touching the enormous, twisted rootstalks of first row of cream-colored ferlii. Towards the middle of the clearing, he could see a group of Lagrah’s white-clad defenders sitting along the edges of a pit, talking. They had their backs to them, but Joe urged his platoon back behind the rocks, out of sight, should Second Battalion happen to glance their way.

  “Is everybody here?” Joe asked quietly. “Squad leaders, count up your grounders.”

  They did, and everyone was accounted for.

  Suddenly, Libby’s face went slack. She tore at her belt, patting it wildly. When she looked up, she was pale. “Joe. The flag. I lost it.”

  Joe jerked around. “What?”

  Libby patted down her belt, swallowing. “I don’t know what happened.”

  Joe stared at her. “You can’t be serious.” He hadn’t meant to be so harsh, but he wasn’t feeling very charitable at the moment. That flag was all that really stood between them and enough manual labor to make them doing chores in their sleep. As it was, it already looked really bad that they were the only platoon from their entire battalion that hadn’t been killed yet.

  “I was the last one out,” Libby said quickly. “It’s in the tunnel somewhere, Joe. Don’t worry, I’ll go find it.” Without another word, she ducked back into the honeycombed tower and disappeared.

  Half an hour went by and Joe was thinking about sending Maggie in after her when Libby returned empty-handed.

  “I went through it twice,” she said, coated with black dust and looking miserable. “I couldn’t find it, Joe.”

  “Let me look,” Maggie said quickly. “I’ll find it. Mommy said I was good at finding stuff.” She dove back in after Libby, but twenty minutes later, she, too, came back empty handed.

  “It’s a tunnel,” Sasha sneered, upon Maggie’s crestfallen return. “How do you lose something in a tunnel?” She laughed, looking Libby lazily up and down. “I knew we couldn’t trust an ape like you.”

  Libby raised her rifle and shot Sasha in the face.

  “Damn it, Libby!” Joe cried, dropping to cover Sasha’s mouth with her jacket as she began to scream. “She was one of our best shots!”

  Libby shrugged. “She deserved it.” She casually threw her gun over her shoulder. “Besides, I’m better.”

  Joe gave her an irritated look and got back to his feet. “Okay, look, the damn thing has to be back there somewhere. Monk, you’re the smallest, can you go back and take a look real quick?”

  Monk grimaced, but did. She came back dirty and shaking her head. “Not back there,” she muttered. “Someone must’ve grabbed it after we came out. They’re never gonna believe we got it.” Her pert chin was quivering with devastation.

  And, as Joe looked at his friends’ faces, he felt their disappointment like a knife to his chest. After all that, they were still going to fail. It wasn’t fair.

  “Look, if we can’t find the flag, we sure as hell better do our best to take out as many of Second Battalion as we can before they get us. We gotta finish this. Okay?”

  Maggie frowned at him. “But we got the flag, Joe. We shouldn’t have to die, right?”

  Hearing her plaintive words, Joe felt another pang of guilt. He almost went back through the tunnel looking for the flag himself. Almost.

  “We’ve gotta kill as many as we can,” Joe muttered, fisting his hand to keep his fingers from shaking at the idea of again entering the tiny space. “It’s the only way they’ll let us get this over with.”

  His entire platoon grimaced. Carl went back looking for the flag, and came back another twenty minutes later, empty-handed. “I don’t understand,” Libby muttered. “I had it, Joe.” She frustratedly threw a chunk of diamond aside and glared at the tunnel.

  Joe shook his head. “Who knows what happened, Lib. Look, we’re just wasting daylight sitting here. What do you guys say we go assault those dweebs over by that pit? Maybe get a few more kills under our belt before they put us down?”

  “Ugh,” Monk said, gripping her rifle.

  “Well soot,” Scott added.

  “This is furgsoot!” Libby cried. “We had it. We shouldn’t have to die.”

  “Yeah, but Nebil’s gonna eat us alive if it looks like we were hiding here all day,” Carl added.

  That was true enough. Joe grimaced. “Come on, guys. Don’t shoot until I give the signal.” Taking one last look at his grounders’ solemn faces, he led them across the pocked landscape to where the defenders sat around the rim of their pit, their backs to them. Before they were quite ready, Libby opened fire. She knocked two off their perches and hit two others before they began to fight back. With a shriek, Libby stood up and ran at them, firing ahead of her, screaming Congie curses.

  It was the first time Libby went down before Joe. Joe watched her fall, feeling guilty. If he hadn’t been such a Takki, he would have been the one to carry the flag through the tunnel and losing it wouldn’t be on her head. Grimly, he settled down to take out as many defenders as he could before Second Battalion overpowered them.

  In the end, the defenders flanked them. It was only minutes before Joe’s entire platoon was having seizures in the dirt. Joe took a shot to the arm, then, as his convulsions began, he got shot again. His heart struggled for a few more seconds, then spasmed and gave up.

  CHAPTER 23: Second Battalion

  “You failed.”

  Joe opened his eyes to see Battlemaster Nebil standing over him, sudah fluttering angrily.

  “You had the flag in your useless Human hands and you failed.” Nebil looked and sounded like he was on the verge of taking his switch to Joe for the offense.

  “You should be happy we got it at all,” Joe muttered.

  “Happy?!” Nebil roared. “You had the tunnels to yourself and a whole platoon of recruits to defend it and you lost the flag. You’d beaten Second Battalion and you lost it.”

  “It was an accident,” Joe said. He sat up. All around him, recruits in black were laid out in rows, waiting to be revived.

  Battlemaster Nebil grabbed him by the jacket and yanked him closer, his gummy eyes almost touching Joe’s face. “An accident, Zero? Or you having a mental breakdown?” At Joe’s flinch, Nebil’s eyes narrowed. “I monitored your bio signs during the whole hunt. I saw what happened when you had to go in that tunnel. Kihgl’s a cursed furg. By the ninety Jreet hells, you’re just a Takki coward!”

  “But we got the flag!” Joe shouted.

  “You lost the flag.” Nebil stood up suddenly. “You made me the laughingstock of the whole regiment. My recruits are such Jreet-kissing furglings they ca
n’t even hold onto a flag. I won’t be able to enter the chow hall without hearing about it. And Commander Tril—” Nebil’s snakelike pupils narrowed. “Best you avoid Commander Tril. He’d already made the call to Second Battalion to brag when he found out you’d lost the flag.”

  That…was not good. Nebil was already turning away in disgust.

  “So teach me how to use the PPU!” Joe cried, grabbing the Ooreiki’s arm. “None of that would’ve happened if I could’ve figured out where we were.”

  Nebil scoffed, though there was a flicker of interest in his wet, gummy eyes.

  Joe leaned forward. “You teach me how to use that thing and I’ll get that flag back next time we attack.”

  Battlemaster Nebil stared at him long and hard. “You fail and I swear to Poen you’ll wish you’d never been born. Understand, Human?”

  Joe nodded, hope beginning to make his heart hammer.

  The Battlemaster took a deep breath through his sudah, still glaring at him. “I’ve signed you up for phobic conditioning. Keep it quiet. So far, Lagrah and I are the only ones who know the truth of what happened to you down there, and I want it to stay that way. Tril would send you to the Dhasha in a second if he knew you were afraid of tunnels.” Nebil snorted. “That’s like having a pilot that’s afraid to fly.”

  Joe felt a chill. “Lagrah knows?”

  “He figured it out, the fire-loving bastard. Didn’t even have to see your brainwaves. Pray Tril’s not that smart.”

  Gingerly, Joe said, “What is phobic…conditioning?”

  “Regulated overexposure. You’ll keep it between the two of us, though. I’ll log your absence as a broken bone you received in the tunnels. Tril will not find out, you understand? Even with treatment, there’s a high chance of recurrence. He’s not going to want to take the chance.”

  Joe swallowed hard, having a pretty good idea what ‘regulated overexposure’ meant. “Can I skip it?”

  Nebil gave him an amused look. “After Lagrah already made the arrangements? No, I don’t think so. You’ll earn me back every credit I spent on you if I have to butcher you and sell your parts to Knaaren.”

  Joe’s throat constricted as he thought again of Lagrah. “And he’s not gonna tell Tril? Even after…what I did…back home?”

  Nebil snorted. “The Takki turd owed me a favor. A big one. He’s even chipping in for your conditioning.”

  “You could give me another rotation,” Joe said hastily. “You don’t have to send me in now. I can work on it. You know, like meditate or something. Besides, once you train me with the PPU, I can spend all my time learning it. You can tell Lagrah I’ll use it to—”

  “No,” the Battlemaster said immediately. “Nobody’s gonna know about the PPU, either, especially not Lagrah. It’s against regulations to teach recruits how to use sensitive Congressional equipment until they’ve completed two turns of training. They figure you’re indoctrinated enough by then to not find a way to mail it back to your home planet with an instruction booklet.”

  Joe frowned. “Then you’re gonna teach me how to use it?”

  “Yes,” Nebil muttered. “Later. Right now, I’ve gotta go deal with Tril and finish cleaning up your mess. Oh, and convince the Jreet-sucking lunatic not to execute your whole platoon. Lagrah will be here soon to take you to medical. The doctors want to get a head start because from those burned-up brainwaves of yours back in the tunnel, you’re gonna be one tough piji shell to crack.”

  With that, Battlemaster Nebil turned on heel and departed with all the force of a freight train. Medics with small golden circles inside their silver borders got out of the way to let him pass, then went back to injecting the red stuff into the kids’ arms. Reluctantly, Joe got to his feet and eyed the approaching haauk. Already, he felt his cold sweat returning.

  This was what he wanted, wasn’t it? All his life, every time he broke down into a sobbing wreck because a friend tried to show him his snow-cave or his uncle tried to get him under a car to look at the oil pan, wasn’t that what he wanted? Back on Earth, with two kids and a mortgage, his parents hadn’t been able to afford sending him to a shrink to figure out what the hell was wrong with him. Here, they would do it for free.

  The thought was not comforting.

  The pilot of the skimmer had the pale, drooping skin of an older Ooreiki. When it grew close enough, Joe could see the black scars criss-crossing its body. He tensed, wondering if Lagrah remembered him from the streets of San Diego, the colorful explosions going off all around them. Steeling himself, Joe moved toward the haauk.

  Once he landed, the Ooreiki Prime looked him over with an unreadable stare. “You Zero?”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, tensing.

  “Get on.” Lagrah showed absolutely no recognition.

  Joe did as he was told, but the Ooreiki never took his eyes off him. Joe’s skin prickled under the stare. Oh please don’t let him remember me…

  Lagrah made no move to take the haauk off the ground, just looked Joe up and down in obvious appraisal. “You’re afraid of tunnels.”

  Joe felt his throat tighten and started to inch back towards to edge of the haauk. “Maybe a little.”

  Lagrah snorted. “A little.” He continued to stare, analyzing Joe with his pale brown eyes. Finally, once Joe was ready to leap over the railing and run, the old Ooreiki said, “Nebil’s lost his mind.”

  Saying nothing else, Lagrah turned back to the haauk console and lifted them off the ground. Once they were in the air, Joe relaxed a little. He doesn’t remember, he thought, relief flooding through him as he thought of how he had rescued Sam and the hundreds of other kids destined for the Ooreiki ship. If he remembered, he’d kill me.

  Prime Commander Lagrah was silent as he guided them back into Alishai. “Well done, getting the flag. My battalion will do laps for that. Are you military-trained, boy?”

  Joe glanced at the Prime nervously. “My dad was in the military on Earth.”

  Lagrah glanced at him. “Ah. Makes sense. A soldier begets a soldier.” He turned back to guiding the haauk between the massive ferlii trees.

  Makes…sense? Joe frowned at Lagrah, wondering if the Prime was giving him some sort of compliment, but Lagrah never clarified.

  “We still haven’t found the flag,” Lagrah said. “And our Takki combed every inch of the area you were in. Any ideas?”

  Joe remembered the diamond dust in the crawlspaces and said, “Uh…probably got buried?”

  “No.” Lagrah gave him another odd look. “You didn’t hide it?”

  Joe frowned. “Hide it? Are you cra—” He caught himself quickly. “No, sir.”

  Lagrah gave him a snort of laughter and said nothing else until they entered the manicured outer ring of Alishai. “You’re supposed to be injured,” Lagrah reminded him, as they neared the hospital. “To get in the front doors without suspicion.”

  Taking a hint, Joe slumped against the side of the haauk, favoring one leg.

  Lagrah brought them to a hover a hundred feet above the medical center, then left it there. “We’re here,” Lagrah said. Joe glanced over the edge. In the walkway underneath, several medics were standing around, chatting, looking like tentacled brown mice. When Joe glanced back up, he froze at the look on his Prime’s face.

  The Ooreiki’s eyes were cold and hard, reminding him of frozen clay. “You can’t fake injuries where you’re going.”

  Joe paled. “Oh, uh…” He grimaced. “What are you gonna break?” He knew all-too-well how much it hurt to break bones, and he was not looking forward to the experience.

  “Probably most of them,” Lagrah said.

  …most? As Joe’s startled mind was stumbling through that, Lagrah took him by the front of his jacket and hefted him off his feet. Into his face, Lagrah said, “This is for robbing us of an extra battalion, you crafty Jreet prick.” At that, the Ooreiki hurled Joe over the railing, at the awaiting medics below.

  #

  Several days later, Joe walked out of the h
ospital feeling numb. His broken bones had healed, but his mind was still ragged where they had ripped it apart. He no longer feared tunnels, but Joe wondered if he would ever be able to sleep again. ‘Regulated overexposure’ had turned out to be just that. Locking him in a coffin for hours on end while an Ooreiki shrink monitored his brainwaves in a separate room and talked about his feelings over the intercom. His throat was still raw from screaming.

  He found his groundteam eating at a table in the chow hall with the rest of Fourth Platoon. As he approached, he saw that Maggie was no longer the only one with her sleeves rolled—Libby was the only one of his groundteam that wasn’t. Even some of the other recruits in the Fourth had bared their arms, including a few squad leaders. Joe was stunned. He had thought that, with him being gone for almost a week, Maggie would have lost interest.

  He got his food and sat down beside Maggie, who wasn’t lifting her gaze from her scum soup. “Tired, Mag?” Joe asked her.

  Maggie jerked and looked up at him with a gleeful expression. “Joe!” she squealed. She jumped up and hugged him, wrapping her not-so-little arms around his neck and touching his chest with what he was pretty sure were breasts.

  “What happened while I was gone?” Joe asked in an attempt to get her to release her hold.

  Maggie dropped back into her seat and began to pick at her scum soup again.

  When no one offered anything else, Scott sighed and said, “They didn’t count it.”

  “Commander Tril made it sound like we were running away the whole time,” Maggie sniffled. “But we weren’t. We had the flag. Libby just lost it.”

  “It’s not fair,” Monk agreed. “They’re acting like we never even had it.”

  “Nobody would believe us,” Maggie continued. “Even First Company hates us. They blame us for losing the flag.”

  Joe did not know what to say. He cleared his throat and nodded at Maggie’s sleeves. “So Nebil stopped making you run?”

  Maggie frowned down at her sleeves, still tightly rolled from the night he’d done it for her. “No, he makes us run.”